Indian biz is testing WhatsApp status

WhatsApp's ambitions are growing, it does not intend to remain just a chat platform. With the launch of WhatsApp for Business, customers in India can now receive updates and delivery confirmations from businesses, as also interact with service providers. In time, it will even allow them to place orders and make payments.

Businesses will have access to the platform's 1 billion daily users, 200 million of who are in India. WhatsApp is doing pilots with a number of companies, including restaurant platform, Zomato, ticketing platform BookMyShow, and medical platform 1mg.1mg has been working on the WhatsApp model for over four months.

Many of its orders for medicines require a prescription, which usually means the company has to get back to customers via email or SMS. “Those channels of communication usually get lost. Not all of the customers check emails frequently. WhatsApp chats have a better response rate," said Gaurav Agarwal, CTO at 1mg.

The company first did a rollout for its employees and now has expanded it to 25% of their customer base.

BookMyShow is replacing SMS with WhatsApp for ticket confirmation. “WhatsApp has been heavily adopted across India. This obviously made WhatsApp our default choice when we decided to replace SMS,“ said Ravdeep Chawla, head of product at the company. WhatsApp reaches more than 91% of Indian smartphone users on social media and communication platforms, says an eMarketer survey. Whatsapp COO Matt Idema told TOI that the company is doing pilots with e-commerce sites, retailers, air lines, banks, and more. “We will also expand the offering to smaller businesses in the coming months," he said.

Many WhatsApp users already use the platform to communicate with businesses. Idema expects the new tools will allow people to communicate with businesses in a faster and more personal way. The chat platform is available in 12 Indian languages. The business offering is free to use now, but WhatsApp plans to charge businesses in the future.

Idema said they are taking measures to ensure the offering does not become a channel for spamming by businesses. “We have controls in the app that make it easy to report spam and delete unwanted messages," he said.

Currently, the platform can only be used for post-order processes. A business on WhatsApp will have a `tick' next to it, so that customers can distinguish it from an individual, and also recognise it as a WhatsApp-verified business. Once a business is verified, customers can contact them through a given number. Customers can choose to opt out of notifications or the communication channel whenever they wish to.

Businesses and WhatsApp together are also testing for payments using the National Payments Corporation of India's UPI (unified payment interface). “We want to allow users to buy medicines through WhatsApp. Talks are still going on with WhatsApp and we are figuring out the best model to work with," said Agarwal of 1mg.With this, WhatsApp would be taking the route taken by WeChat, the most popular messaging app in China. WeChat is used as a platform for shopping, browsing, hailing a cab and for booking services of any kind.

“This advantage allowed WeChat to rapidly gain market share to emerge as the second most popular mobile wallet in China. WeChat Pay commanded a market share of 37% at the end of 2016 while market leader AliPay controlled by Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial commanded 55%.WhatsApp enjoys a similar position in India," said LD Investments, an investment advisory blogger on the Seeking Alpha platform.

The blog says: “With WhatsApp building an e-commerce environment within its messaging app, it is not hard to imagine a future where Indian businesses begin accepting payments for their services from customers who would make payments using a mobile wallet from WhatsApp. This could enable WhatsApp to capture market share in India's burgeoning mobile wallet space and possibly provide a strong revenue stream for WhatsApp going forward."